Background of the Problems

I. INTRODUCTION

In this introduction chapter, the researcher explains the background of the problems that is the reasons for conducting the research. It includes the identification of the problems, the limitation of problems, formulation of the problems, the objective, uses and scope of the research and the last part of this chapter is the definition of terms related to the topic of this research.

1.1. Background of the Problems

In learning English, there are four kinds of language skills to be mastered, i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing. For the students who learn English as foreign language, they need to develop their language skills. Based on the 2006 curriculum, in junior high schools that apply the school-based-curriculum KTSP, the students are expected to learn English from various types of text. It means that the students are dealing with many texts which are mostly discussed in reading activity. Reading plays an important role in teaching and learning process. By reading the text, the learners are involved in bringing the information, knowledge, emotion, experience, and culture. In reading process, the students are required to be a good reader. In reading, they have substantial skills to comprehend the text. There are five aspects which helped the students to comprehend the English text, they are identify the main idea, getting the specific information, making inferences, reference and identify the vocabularies. Meanwhile, based on the information from the teacher when the researcher conducted the pre research in SMP Taman Siswa Tanjung karang, in comprehending the descriptive text some of Junior High School students still have difficulties to identify the main of those five reading aspects from the text. They also tended to be passive because of the students have no good self confidence in learning English. So, it was difficult for them to learn English well because they regarded that English was difficult to be learn. In addition, when the students had some problems to get the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary from the text, they would spent much time looking up their dictionary to see the meaning of that unfamiliar vocabulary then they were able to understand the meaning and answered the questions. Moreover, there was one important factor that might influence the students’ problems in reading that was the reading strategy. Based on the researcher’s observation in SMP Taman Siswa Tanjung Karang by interviewing the students, the researcher found that the students’ difficulties in transferring the information from the text and answering the questions were caused by the reading strategy. For example, when the teacher gave the students some questions directly, they could not answer quickly. So, the teacher asked to the students what was become their problem, some students said that they could not answer because they do not know how the way to understand the text. In addition, they did not understand about the meaning of the words, so that they did not understand the content of reading passage. As the result the students could not answer the questions from the text, identify the main idea, get the specific information, make inferences, find reference and identify the vocabularies from the text, so that those factors give the influence to the students’ achievement in comprehending of descriptive text. There are many reading strategies that can be used to teach reading, one of them was contextual clues strategy. Contextual clues strategy is the strategy how the readers use some clues of word based on the reading passage. The clues are sometimes placed in the same sentence as an unfamiliar word, or in nearby sentences. It proposed to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words and clues which are related to the content of the text. Moreover, it can also be used to overcome the students’ problems identify the main idea, get the specific information, making inferences, reference and identify the vocabularies from the text given by the teacher. Realizing the benefit of contextual clues strategy in reading comprehension, the researcher assumed that might be the influence of this strategy to the students’ achievement in reading descriptive text that would also help the students get the information from the text by understanding the meaning unfamiliar words. Moreover, the researcher proposed this research to investigate whether or not contextual clues strategy can give the influence on the students’ reading comprehension achievement. In this research, the researcher focused on the desc riptive text because the students’ problem comprehended the descriptive text.

1.2. Identification of the Problems